Education

On the top landing of the Royal Academy is the Sackler Sculpture Corridor, a long stony shelf of torsos of gods, martial bodies, heads, a vast foot. At one end Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo is hidden behind slightly green glass. It is worth any pilgrimage. At the other end is a modest door into the print room and library. You walk into darkness and drama, steps running down past vast print chests and into a double-height library, lit from oculi above. This is where the marbles and plaster casts used to be housed. It was transformed into a library 25 years ago by H.T. Cadbury-Brown, the architect of the Royal College

Sikander and I are sitting at a small table in a small shed. The shed is filled floor-to-ceiling with books: chick lit, thrillers and a neat set of Agatha Christies line the shelves, alongside a large atlas, a few dictionaries and grammars, and the thin green spines of children’s learning-to-read books. More books spill out of boxes stacked in the corner, and pens, notepads, bags of clothes, a globe, a guitar and a game of Battleships are useful flotsam. We are in Jungle Books, a library which British volunteer Mary Jones set up a few weeks ago in the Calais migrant camp known as ‘The Jungle’. Sikander, a lean Afghan,

In six months’ time, my son is due to attend an assessment day for a nursery. The details on the nursery’s website are deliberately sketchy — presumably to avoid parents coaching their children — but it seems to involve my son being observed while he plays and graded on the results of his burbling: it sounds very much like an interview. He is going to be two and a half. It is easy to be satirical about a child going for an interview at the age of two and a half — his PowerPoint skills are not up to it; we haven’t arranged a single internship for him; he doesn’t

King’s College London Mathematics School is precisely one year old. And on 13 August it woke up to AS-level results that make it one of the ten best state schools in the country. 97 per cent of students got an A in mathematics. 90 per cent of grades in maths and further maths were As. Students’ grades were, on average, two grades higher, across all their subjects, than would be expected from their GCSE results. As a governor, I bask in reflected glory. Ours is a ‘free school’ sponsored by King’s, and it teaches talented, committed 16- to 18-year-olds. We select for potential, using our own test. But we also

Every year without fail, as the trees start thinking about losing their leaves, the papers are full of the same photographs and the same stories. The pictures are of groups of teenagers grinning triumphantly — hugging one another or throwing their exam results in the air in joy. What we have just experienced is exam results week; or, to be precise, results fortnight: first A-levels and then, one week later, GCSEs. GCSEs lead to A-levels, A-levels to university (and yet more exams) — and then at the end of it all? Well, that’s the next obstacle. But for parents, as well as children, the endless tests can be incredibly confusing.

A black head teacher told me a story of his early days at a failing inner-city school. The job was a thankless one and everybody was waiting anxiously for the arrival of the new ‘super-head’ (the school had gone through three leaders in two years). In the playground it was leaked that the new head was an old-school type from Jamaica. During his first encounter with the students, they asked him how many children he had. He told them he had one and that she lived with him and his wife. ‘No sir, how many do you have in Jamaica?’ they asked. He replied: ‘None.’ They jeered, ‘Oh sir you’re

Watching a group of unruly children make mincemeat out of a well-meaning teacher has become a television staple and Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School, a factual entertainment series that debuted on BBC2 on Tuesday, is a case in point. We look on aghast as five teachers from China struggle to manage a class of ordinary 14-year-olds in England. They quickly discover that the techniques that have made Chinese schoolchildren the envy of the world don’t work with Kevin the Teenager. On the face of it, the Chinese educational model has much to recommend it. Shanghai is at the top of the Pisa international education league tables in maths,

‘Rude, bone idle… and cosseted by the welfare state! Chinese teachers’ damning verdict on British children after spending a month in UK classrooms. Yes – just about right, I reckon. Except, of course, the English head teacher at the school thinks the Chinese are completely wrong and that their teaching methods are boring. And that we need to show the kids respect, m’kay? My suspicion is that we show the kids too much respect and that teachers are not there to be clownish entertainer, to pander.